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It is probable that in sleep which is entirely undisturbed the ego is without cathexis, i.e. is cathected only as it is in an embryo (or perhaps we should say: in a sleeping embryo). From such sleep the ego of the day before awakes as the ego of the actual moment; the more normal the sleep and the awakening the more instantaneous is the restoration of cathexis. It follows that in a moment of time the ego has to recapitulate its whole genesis. Since this phenomenon occurs daily with the coming of morning I propose to call it 'orthriogenesis', 2 a word coined on the analogy of onto - and phylogenesis. Although we should have to invent a 'slow-motion camera for the recording of psychic phenomena' in order to perceive the whole process of normal awakening, it is nevertheless no mere flight of fancy to assume that such a process takes place. On the contrary, this assumption is helpful, indeed indispensable, in the more exact description and, I venture to think, in the explanation of many phenomena of dream-life.
The dream-ego is always only partly awakened, it possesses only a fragment of the compass and content of the ego in the waking state, the cathexis of its ego-boundary is merely such as is required by the dream-scene of the moment and some of its functions are wholly absent.3 With regard to its stage of life, we may say that, in the majority of dreams, the ego approximates very closely to that which has been actually reached by the dreamer; that is to say, it is the ego of the period between yesterday and to-day. But in quite a large number of dreams and in even more dream-fragments the ego which experiences them is awake only up to the point of some quite early level in its existence. Probably it is as we grow older that we dream-investigators occasionally experience such dreams, and this draws our